Death By A Thousand Cabinets: How Democracy Defeated France
How a broken political class led a nation to ruin – and why the same instincts still govern her today.
After the unimaginable devastation of World War I, France emerged victorious, yet profoundly scarred. With a million-man army, its primary mission was clear: to secure its borders and ensure Germany could never again threaten its existence.
This imperative, born of four German invasions in a century and the catastrophic destruction of its northern territories, shaped a demanding policy aimed at making Germany pay for the war's immense costs. While Britain urged reconciliation, France, driven by a complex mix of legitimate security fears, economic desperation, and a deeply traumatized public demanding justice, pursued a path of dominance.
French governments seen as too soft on Germany – or worse, subservient to Britain – faced swift collapse. Six-time Prime Minister Aristide Briand learned this the hard way in 1922. Accused of leniency toward Germany, his downfall was sealed after a humiliating golf thrashing by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Recalled to Paris, Briand resigned in disgrace.
In 1922, President Alexandre Millerand appointed Raymond Poincaré as prime minister, a figure renowned for his resolve. A lawyer with an economic background from the annexed region of Lorraine, Poincaré was determined to enforce Germany's adherence to the Treaty of Versailles with unyielding tenacity. Driven by a conviction that Germans were fundamentally a militarist people who could not be reasoned with nor rehabilitated, his ambition was not merely France’s security but to actively weaken Germany while simultaneously satisfying a French public desperate for tangible results and retribution.
Poincaré’s strategy involved relentless pressure on Germany’s Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau. Rathenau's days were consumed by an endless stream of Poincaré’s diplomatic notes – filled with demands, accusations, and thinly veiled threats – leaving him perpetually exhausted and threatening resignation. Occasionally summoned to Paris and deliberately kept waiting for days, Rathenau believed Poincaré was intent on invading the Ruhr regardless of German compliance.
Poincaré’s method was to overwhelm the German Foreign Office, creating a pretext for non-compliance with reparations demands. This culminated in his boldest move: the 1923 occupation of the Ruhr, ostensibly launched to extract coal, timber, and coke as reparations.
Beyond mere extraction, Poincaré harboured deeper strategic aims: to destabilize Germany’s government or provoke a reaction that would justify further escalation, with some French generals even planning for a march on Berlin. Poincaré even flirted with the idea of creating an independent Rhenish Republic. However, Germany’s strategy of passive resistance led to a costly stalemate, resulting in the deaths of 132 Germans as French forces attempted to seize resources, and forever ruining the prospect of enticing the Rhinelanders to Rhenish separatism.
Poincaré’s promised prosperity unravelled. Forced to plea with the National Assembly for more funds, the entire venture damaged ties with Britain and the United States, to whom France owed a lot money on whom it depended on for steel. Voters grew frustrated with the lack of results.
This approach significantly defined French foreign policy through the 1920s and early 1930s. Governments maintained a tough stance on Germany not solely because Weimar ministers were uncooperative, nor later due to an overwhelming aversion to Hitler and Nazism, but because such belligerence resonated with a war-weary and justice-seeking electorate. By rejecting Weimar Germany’s earnest, if sometimes limited, attempts at compromise, France inadvertently fueled a deep well of resentment within Germany, making the Nazi Party’s promise to reverse these humiliations powerfully appealing. In 1932, the Nazi Party secured 33% of the vote, capitalizing in part on potent anti-French sentiment.
France’ Fading Grip: The Hitler Years
By the mid-1930s, France’s diplomatic influence had waned, yet its leaders often doubled down on their hardline rhetoric. The French public, deeply scarred by the Great War, dreaded another conflict. Antagonising Germany was supported only as long as it brought tangible benefits without bloodshed, a promise the political class neglected to deliver, guaranteeing and allying with nations that now occupied what was once the German Empire.
Clutching the Treaty of Versailles like a tattered, fading banner, France found itself strategically paralysed, seemingly blind to the reality that its ink no longer held sway over a resurgent Germany. The public’s understandable aversion to German militarism was, tragically, misinterpreted by some of the French political class as an endorsement for continued confrontation, even if this path risked war. And so, they continued a course that, in hindsight, appeared tragically self-destructive.
France was undeniably right to fear Hitler’s repeated quests for military parity. However, its earlier insistence on humiliation – from the Ruhr occupation to its consistent rejection of Germany’s rehabilitation within the international community – had sown seeds of profound resentment. This created in Hitler a particular desire to punish France, a sentiment not as acutely directed towards Britain.
The 1936 Rhineland crisis starkly exposed France’s strategic decline. When Hitler remilitarised the region, a direct violation of Versailles, France hesitated. Leaders like Édouard Daladier, constrained by a war-weary public, a precarious financial situation, and an army stretched by defensive doctrines, ultimately chose inaction. Their public posturing, whilst intended to appease domestic voters and project strength, instead exposed France’s underlying docility to the world, particularly to a re-arming Germany.
The Lasting Impact
When France fell catastrophically in 1940, the immediate aftermath saw elements of the political class scapegoat cultural shifts – from jazz and alcohol to short skirts and contraception – for creating a "cult of ease" that supposedly sapped national fighting spirit. Yet, the deeper fault lay with leaders who deflected blame from their own strategic failures, demanding that soldiers sacrifice their youth to uphold outdated treaty obligations and a foreign policy that failed to adapt to a changing continent. Those brave Frenchmen who fought surrendered only their youth, not their honour, to a political class that tragically failed them.
Nearly a century later, democratic governments risk repeating this pattern – elevating short-term popularity and rhetorical posturing towards the bogeyman of the day above strategic coherence. While the stakes today differ, the danger of mistaking public appetite for justice as license for escalation remains.
